Just Another Recovering Person

I am reminded from the NA Text in Chapter 7 about trying to fill ourselves up until we get full, only there is no way to fill us help. That we think if we can just get enough food, or sex, or money we will be ok. I struggle with all 3.

I guess this is the part where I get honest. I just shredded 2 credit cards I was saving for “emergencies”. Those emergencies turned out to be lunches at restaurants, snack food, and junk. I find with food,tend to eat later at night, eat more than I should and have been picking foods that I consider my “favorites” instead of variety. The sex part is probably the most painful. I haven’t cheated on my wife except in my mind. The plague of fantasy while my own sex life at home suffers has become unbearable.

I had many problems the first 18 months of recovery with sex, hell I still do. The first 18 months there were physical issues due to my use. The rest has been mental and emotional issues. God, I can’t believe I’m putting this out here but I have come to understand that if I don’t talk about it eats me up alive. Part of it is intimacy, part of it is expectation, part of it is fantasy. I have discovered that my wife is loving and patient. I have found I am terribly afraid of physical rejection and inadequacy. I have found that sex does not equal love, nor love equal sex. I have found that porn is the gateway to a fantasy world that few ever return from. I have found that porn is not real sex, nor real love.

With all of this being said, where is the hope? The hope is that I understand now that all that is going on is more than obvious if I open my ears, my mind, and my heart. I see now what is happening and I am not liking it at all. I have come too far to dig myself into a financial hole with credit cards, gain an ungodly amount of weight, or a man who is unable to maintain a healthy relationship with his wife based on some fantasy sex life taken from a Hooch with fake boobs and a guy with an uncommon 14 inch dick on the internet, it’s not real life.

I sent a text message to a friend in Texas and was thrilled to get an email from her. She is the yoga instructor I mentioned a few posts back that I met on another site whom we shared blogs with. Elizabeth has been a great “friend I never met from the Internet”. We have exchanged a few emails and it has been wonderful to hear from her. That reminds me I need to text another fellow in Michigan I know. I am terrible and maintaining relationships over extended periods of time and really want to put forth effort into this area.

If this blog seems like it has been nothing more than confession, it has. I have been a bucket with a hole in it. The saying that we hear in recovery is true. When the pain of remaining the same is stronger than the pain of change, we will change. Most of the pain I go through is self-made, an illusion of problems that I have created. Life and the world continue to march on doing their own thing. I just continue to create havoc, even clean.